United States President Donald Trump’s offer to rehouse white South Africans as refugees fleeing persecution may not spur quite the rush he anticipates, as right-wing white lobby groups want to “tackle the injustices” of Black majority rule on home soil.
Trump on Friday signed an executive order to cut US aid to South Africa, citing an expropriation act that President Cyril Ramaphosa signed last month aiming to redress land inequalities that stem from South Africa’s history of white supremacy.
Trump’s order provided for resettlement in the US of “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” as refugees.
Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own the majority of the country’s farmland.
“If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” asked Neville van der Merwe, a 78-year-old pensioner in Bothasig near Cape Town.
“There hasn’t been any really bad [people] taking over our land, the people are carrying on like normal and you know, what are you going to do over there?”
The act signed by Ramaphosa seeks to address racial land ownership disparities – which have left three-quarters of privately owned land in South Africa in the hands of the white minority – by making it easier for the state to expropriate land in the public interest.
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